Teaching Obesity, Selling Sickness

We are subsidizing our own disease burden.

As the country goes through another excruciating health-care fight in Washington, I find myself watching more CNN than I should, and I can’t help but notice the commercials. Half of them (I exaggerate only slightly) are for weight-loss schemes, in which the pre-packaged, highly processed meals sent to your door somehow shrink your waistline. The other half are for pharmaceutical drugs meant to treat diet-related diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. (Given that we’re the only country in the world except New Zealand that allows direct-to-consumer marketing of pharmaceutical drugs, these numbers are not altogether surprising.)

Our health-care problem is often symbolized by the number 17: the percentage of GDP that we spend on it, a figure higher than almost any country in the world. Three different numbers should take its place: America’s rank in the global charts for diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.

Life magazine wrote in 1955 that Americans were “as well fed as any people in the world. Each generation is taller, bigger and healthier than the preceding one—and each has a longer life expectancy.”

In 2004, then-Surgeon General Richard Carmona sounded a different note: “Because of the increasing rates of obesity, unhealthy eating habits and physical inactivity, we may see the first generation that will be less healthy and have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.”

The role of personal dietary choice in these abysmal health statistics cannot be overlooked, and paternalistic laws monkeying with the size of soda bottles are not the answer. However, our food system is dominated by a relatively small handful of large, well-connected, and well-protected industrial agricultural firms and food manufacturers. Call it the agricultural-industrial complex.

The most obvious nexus between industrial agriculture and complicit government regulators is the farm-subsidy system, which neither helps small farmers nor promotes the production of nutritious food. Its primary effect is to subsidize industrially produced corn and soy, as well as sugar, which in turn become the major ingredients or fillers for a vast cornucopia of highly processed and refined foods manufactured by the likes of Kraft, Nestle, and PepsiCo. This operates as an indirect subsidy for junk-food manufacturers, whose hundreds of brands and product lines fill shelf after shelf in the supermarket.

Beyond farm subsidies, this cronyism manifests itself in certain laws. Michael Pollan reports in The Omnivore’s Dilemma that slaughterhouses are required to have bathrooms and sinks with regular plumbing. Polyface Farm, a tiny organic farm in rural Virginia, has no bathroom or sink because its slaughtering area is not a building but a semi-open pavilion. Joel Salatin, the proprietor of Polyface, struggled to convince regulators that he deserved an exemption, even though his meat products had fewer pathogens than those from industrial operations. And until recently, food-safety laws written with industrial manufacturers in mind effectively banned individuals or very small businesses from selling any food products. (This has now been largely remedied by “cottage food laws.”)

Whether or not such laws and regulations are written for the benefit of industrial agriculture, the fact is that they appear and operate as though they were.

Another aspect of the problem is the pervasive junk-food contracts that food giants have made with struggling public schools. In 2012, Mother Jones reported that a whopping 80 percent of public schools had exclusive contracts with either Coke or Pepsi to provide all drinks on premises, primarily as a means of augmenting tightening school budgets. The report also found that children in these schools were more likely to be obese than children in schools without such contracts. This is especially appalling because dietary and nutritional preferences are largely formed in youth and tend to become habits. Instead of funding our schools, we are funding industrial corn farmers, whose product sweetens the soda that is habituating our children to a lifetime of unhealthy eating.

All of this matters because the food products driving our epidemic levels of diet-related disease are not those being made by small proprietors and tiny organic farms. The disease burden instead is driven primarily by the boxed, bagged, vacuum-sealed, bottled, canned, and otherwise processed concoctions coming out of the taxpayer-subsidized agricultural-industrial complex.

In essence, we are subsidizing our own disease burden, and in turn paying for its alleviation through our overburdened health-care system. Japan and France have healthier populations and cheaper health-care systems not because their people or their governments are superior but because their food systems have not been colonized by an artificial oversupply of pseudo-food.

Against a rising tide of taxpayer-subsidized pathology, there is only so much that investments in even the best health-care system in the world can do. Dismantling the agricultural-industrial complex might pay more health dividends.

Addison Del Mastro is an editorial assistant at The American Conservative.

Here’s a surprising, to some people, statement. It’s all about money. Almost everything in our capitalist paradise is about money. Want to make money? Advertise to children from as soon as they’re able to talk and watch TV, promoting whatever you’re selling that tastes good, to hell with its nutritional value if any, and wheelbarrow the money to the bank. It increases diabetes (we now have junior high school age kids getting “adult onset” diabetes), well, so what? They grow up obese, can’t live anything close to a normal life, can’t get medical care because our capitalist paradise doesn’t provide that, well, so what? The main thing, almost the only thing, is to make that money.

I live where both soybeans and sugar cane are raised. I guess it differs by area, but the cane farmers I know are family farmers and most of the crop is farmed on rented land.
They’re increasingly being squeezed out by real estate development which is far more profitable.
I’m more concerned about the loss of prime agricultural land than subsidies. Developers get their own sorts of tax breaks and subsidies at the taxpayers expense. And once that land is paved over it’s gone for good.

Corn syrup is the primary cause of the current obesity. Corn syrup is addictive, fattening and put into many packaged foods that would not have the needed shelve life, without corn syrup. What is truly insane is the government subsidized corn, tobacco and other such products but does not subsidize fruits, nuts and vegetable. Go figure.

Very True! I eat farmers market food. I gave up wheat and lost 20 pounds. Yes wheat. The hybrid food where a slice of organic whole wheat raises blood pressure more than a candy bar. The AMA, Diabetes Association, and all others are in on the big lie about americas food.

Actually, the current state of American agriculture is not an instance of free market forces at all, but the result of very deliberate and interventionist food policies and farm subsidy policies – many of which were well-intended, but had huge unintended consequences.

Better food costs more money than many in the working class and lower economic classes can afford. They can work sick, but can’t function three hours without some soda or energy drink with no nutritional value. What is really funny is watching someone worried about eating well that won’t give up smoking. There is also the time factor involved in preparing and cooking better quality meals than many parents have after both come home from work. And consistantly exercise? When? Why should our food choices be any different the rest of the garbage we choose to allow in our lives? And don’t forget bad sleep habits. Please pass the unhealthy, chocolate chip cookies.

The American of say 1960 was indeed slimmer than the American of 2017 is. However the reason they were is that the great majority of American adults of that era were smokers. Smoking reduces appetite, replaces to a certain degree snacking which tends to increase weight.

The rise in obesity parallels the decrease in smoking. We have effectively simply replaced one life shortening activity with another.

I make every effort to exercise at least three imes a week and eat right.

But I love twizzlers and nesle’s bars. My housemate routinely buys these two goodies. Regardless of how many times I say limit the amount she doesn’t. Despite knowing that I have relinquished any control on the matter, she operates like a roadside ‘pusher” and I like a salivating junkie in desperate need of a fix.

In the end, it’s not her, it’s me. The fact that the market sells junk does not require that I purchase it or eat it. My health is largely in my hand and for those times when it’s not, there’s nothing in the market that forces me to speed up biological destruction.

It’s not the market. It’s not the advertisers and it’s not my roommate. It’s not government subsidies that controls what I eat.

I do think that parents and schools systems should take care what they provide children.

To those commenting negatively about the free market, you are seriously missing the point the author is making: it is NOT a free market. Big corps are subsidized and regulations work to suffocate smaller independents. This is one of the major downsides people don’t understand about regulation: it eliminates competition and favors a smaller number of larger participants, in order to better absorb the cost. Mom & Pop shops/business can’t fund the regulatory requirements, so they go out of business or are sold to larger enterprises.

Mrscracker is correct. Sugar cane is typically raised on small family farms. Now sugar beets are a different story — they are a GMO product and here in the middle of The Mitten they are everywhere, vast fields of them that turn into huge piles by railroad sidings that haul them to processing plants in Sebewaing etc.

Our food manufacturers (!!!) have turned a necessary item into a drug akin to how the tobacco industry changed cigarettes into an even more lethal weapon.

Good, thoughtful post.
As a flower binds a bee to itself with the help of color, smell, sweet nectar, so the agricultural-industrial complex, restaurateurs, tie the consumer to themselves, because their economy and well-being directly depend on the consumption of their product.
Glutamate and food spices are designed to increase consumption.
Attachment to anything at the expense of health is a dependence. Obesity is a consequence of food dependence. Food gives the meaning of life to many people.
An affluent diet enables doctors to earn their money …
But it happens that a person forgets about food. This happens when an important idea takes possession of his consciousness. So maybe not smoking, but the ideas of the past centuries were more exciting? I still think that the generation of new all-absorbing ideas might pay more health dividends than dismantling the agricultural-industrial complex.

True, yet if you compare the cost of a CT scan in America vs. Germany vs. Japan, the cost is higher by several hundred percent, which wouldn’t change even if you cut down the number of fat kids.

Part of this is the unjustified assault on fat in the diet, which has people eating over maintenance due to feeling hungry on low fat diets, and overeating on simple carbohydrates (to avoid “bad fats”). Just chow on the steak and asparagus (with a healthy helping of butter), and wash down with whole milk.

“paternalistic laws monkeying with the size of soda bottles are not the answer.”

Why can’t that be part of the answer? Mexico has had a measurable drop in obesity by taxing sugary drinks.

Also, to the other commenters, the problem isn’t fat, grain or sugar–it is too many CALORIES, of any source. Added fats, added sugars and refined carbohydrates are all the three big contributors to the excess calories in the American diet.

But of course, Michelle Obama’s push for healthy food for children, and advocacy of gardens was just an instance of a “nanny state” that interfered with the right of parents to do what they thought was best for children…..

Michelle Obama was mocked mercilessly for pointing out the very thing that this article has posited. The next thing you know conservatives will suddenly discover that the opiate addiction crisis is also a health issue (not just a moral issue) and call for the end of mass incarceration and an increase in health funding…
Never mind…

In reality, food stamps have a purpose and will probably continue to be distributed in one form or another.

All the concerns about the nanny-state aside, why can a person buy soda with food stamps? It seems to me that people who feed at the troth of the nanny-state might also be obliged to conform to the dictates of the likes of Michelle.

I agree; let’s have a vigorous, productive discussion about all of the factors that make obesity such a huge problem in the United States. Maybe we’ll even solve some of these problems, but, ultimately, it is MY responsibility to ensure that I eat healthful, nutritious meals.

Read some food labels. The majority of what’s out there is packed with sweet gunk. Salad dressings, soups, yogurts, breads, deli meats, drinks, snacks, etc. If it’s processed 99% of the time it’s sweetened.

Government subsidies are of course absurd and harmful, but in point of fact it does not cost appreciably more to eat wisely.
Simply cutting out white sugar/high fructose corn syrup and white flower gets one 75% of the way to ending obesity and that requires very little effort and for most people costs the same or less with a little careful shopping.

It’s kind of odd to read a story and so many comments talking about Big Food and addictions to Slushies at a place called the Americanconservative. The conservatism I grew up on stressed individual responsibility and ridiculed progressive scapegoating of “society” for irresponsible individual choices.

Finally, Michelle Obama was mocked but not nearly mercilessly enough for literally trying to shove what she defined as healthy food down our kids’ gullets.
Typical prog who can’t understand the difference between “pointing out” something and making other people do what the prog wants them to at the point of a gun.